Bishop Joseph E. Strickland: Athanasius Against the World

The deepest wounds to the Church do not come from outside her walls.

The Roman Empire could persecute Christians. Tyrants could imprison saints. Governments could try to silence the Gospel. But the wounds that cut most deeply into the Mystical Body of Christ are the wounds inflicted from within – when truth is obscured, when shepherds grow silent, and when the faithful begin to wonder whether anyone will still speak clearly.

And many faithful Catholics today are carrying that grief.

They look at the Church they love and barely recognize what is happening. They hear voices within the Church speaking ambiguously about sins that Sacred Scripture speaks of plainly. They watch Catholic teaching treated as though it were something flexible, something evolving, something to be reshaped according to the demands of modern culture. They watch confusion spread while those who defend what the Church has always taught are dismissed as rigid, divisive, or uncharitable. …

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